


Us Mechanics

by LinearA



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/F, Gossip, Hand Kink, Hands, Oral Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Rude speculation on the sexual prowess of others, Smut, The Looming Spectre of Heterosexuality, desertrose, suggestive eating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 15:12:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14167629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LinearA/pseuds/LinearA
Summary: Q. How can you tell when a mechanic's gotten laid?A. Two of her fingers are clean.Sweets, gossip, and a small revelation lead Rose to take an unusually long break from work.





	Us Mechanics

It’s a mild day, but refurbishing the hydraulics of exterior doors is hot work, and Rose swings her legs out over the edge of the catwalk, turning her whole body to catch the breeze of the X-wing as it lands. All the sweaty skin at her hairline, under her arms, between her breasts, even behind her knees, is suddenly and blessedly cool as the fighter slides in. The gust of displaced air and the growl of the wheels on the gritty landing strip cover the sound of footsteps on the grating behind her, and so she jumps a little when Rey sits down beside her.

 

“Rey!”

 

“Hello.” Rey smiles and holds out a paper box. She pulls up the cover so that Rose can see the rows of small pasties, baked to a shine, neatly cut and golden.

 

“Oh my gosh!” Rose’s eyes are wide. She makes them that way on purpose, to show Rey how astonished she is, how impressed. “What are they? Can I have one?”

 

“You can have --” Rey counts quickly, “-- eight. They’re a local dessert. For mechanics only.”

 

“Really? Is that tradition or something?”

 

Rey laughs. “No. It’s a decision I have made. As the owner of this box. Only us mechanics get to have any, since we’ve been working harder than anybody. Wipe your fingers first, though.” She offers Rose a clean rag from inside her tunic, and Rose hurries to scrub as much grease off her fingers as she can. The rag goes black immediately, before she can start on her left hand, but she only needs one hand to eat.

 

Rey offers the box again and Rose slips her clean right hand in and plucks one pastry out. It’s the size of her thumb-joint, and slightly sticky. She pops it into her mouth and almost cries for joy as the flakey thing begins to dissolve on her tongue. It’s spiced with something dark and rich, and when she crunches down, a sweet, botanical syrup oozes out.

 

“Good, right?” says Rey, taking one herself. She swings her legs idly over the empty space of the landing bay, looking down.

 

“So good,” says Rose fervently. “So good. So so good.” Rey puts the box down between them and crunches on her own. She sighs, and closes her eyes in bliss. Rose understands. “The syrup, right?”

 

“Yes! Delicious!” says Rey with a groan. Rose looks around to make sure no one is coming to steal anything they haven’t earned – she’s earned these; Rey said so. She waits to take a second. She wants another immediately but she isn’t going to stuff her face in front of Rey. Rey’s a Jedi. Rey has self-discipline. Rey… reaches into the box and grabs two more in one fist, a huge and guiltless smile plastered on her face. Rose takes another right away and crunches down again.

 

Rey leans over the lower bar of the catwalk railing, looking down at X-wing, which stands empty now that Poe has scrambled out to stand in its shadow and chat with the ground team. She laughs. “What?” Rose asks, her third pastry in hand.

 

Rey leans in, conspiracy and humor in her face, and Rose leans in too, thrilled to be there, thrilled to be _us mechanics_ with the girl who can move mountains. Rey asks, her voice just a little lower than normal, “D’you ever look at someone and think, _I know how you’d be in bed?”_

 

Rose shrieks, the tiniest of shrieks, which she smothers with her fingers and the pastry. She opens her eyes as wide as they’ll go as she chews and says, around her sweet, “Rey! Rey, what?!”

 

“No but look,” insists Rey, pointing down to where Poe is stroking a damaged panel on his fighter with one hand and twiddling BB-8’s antenna with another. “Are you really going to tell me you look at Poe and think he’d be bad at sex? And _don’t_ ,” she says firmly, as Rose chews furiously, “tell me you’ve never thought about it.”

 

Rose slows down her chewing; the pastry is too good to waste. And she has thought about it. Of course she has. She sighs.

 

“Right?” says Rey. She leans in again, and Rose leans in too, the pleasure of conspiracy too strong to resist. “Like, Poe would _obviously_ be good, right?”

 

“Yeah,” says Rose, looking down appraisingly at the pilot in question. “But he’d _know_ it and he’d be really _smug_ about it and if he’s _that_ smug, is it really worth it?” Rey looks down at Poe too, considering, and Rose adds, “I mean, you’d definitely get off. He like, wouldn’t let you leave until you’d gotten off. But then he’d expect you to be all dazzled. And in love with him. And… nah.” She shakes her head, as if Poe were a dish she were politely declining.

 

Rey nods slowly. “You’re probably right,” she says. “Though it might be fun to love him and leave him.”

 

“Oh, please don’t! He’ll break his fool neck trying to win you back.”

 

“I’m not _going_ to. I’m just... _speculating_. Look. Finn, right? Finn has to be hopeless. There’s no way they teach Stormtroopers about sex. It’d be much too disruptive. Do you think he even knows we have different parts?”

 

Rose feels torn. Finn is her boy. Or he will be, soon, once they talk about it. He’s so handsome, so sweet, so lovable, and so earnest. But Rey is so _right_. She can see his marveling, astounded expression in her mind so clearly. “You could teach him, though,” she argues. “I bet he’s teachable.”

 

“Oh, yeah, for sure!” agrees Rey, plucking another pastry into her hand. “Anything you want to teach him, he’d be dying to learn. He’d hang on your every word.”

 

“He’d take notes,” Rose giggles, and Rey laughs back, her sweet wicked smile spreading and her eyes shining, and Rose pushes a little further, putting on an impression of Finn in deep concentration, brow wrinkled. “’So… I touch _there_ and then I touch _that…_ or is it the other way around?’” Rey’s laugh turns high-pitched and Rose feels a little bad for Finn again. Poor Finn. He can’t be that bad, or she wouldn’t want him herself, would she? And she has wanted him. “I mean, he _would_ listen, though. And that’s really what makes a person good, in the end, isn’t it? I feel like Poe would be so cocky that he’d be like, ‘No no, just let me work; I know what I’m doing!’ And he’d just keep doing it, even if it wasn’t really doing... it... for you.”

 

“You are sooo right,” says Rey. “He would. Do you know,” and she leans in even further; the box between them is getting crushed and Rose reaches in to filch more pastries out as Rey half-whispers delightedly in her ear, “I heard General Organa say Han Solo was like that!”

 

Rose’s jaw drops. “No!”

 

Rey nods hard, taking more pastry out of the box. “She said, ‘Flyboys like that, they think everything’s a ship. They think they just have to find your throttle and lean on it, and that’s all there is to it.’”

 

“She _said_ that?” marvels Rose, as Rey crunches wetly through her sweet. “Like, in public? Or just to you?”

 

“She was talking to Connix, but I heard her.” Rey begins to lick her fingers. Rose becomes aware that her hand, too, is sticky with that syrup. She raises it to her nose, inhaling the smell, like a sweet herb or a dry flower, and watches Rey’s tongue swipe up and down her narrow fingers. She wonders if there was some kind of alcohol in the pastries; that would explain why she feels like this, warm and a little too giddy. It would explain, too, maybe what she says next.

 

“What about Kylo Ren?”

 

Rey’s face goes dark like an emergency brown-out and her hand drops away from her mouth to clang on the catwalk beside her. Rose is instantly sorry she said anything; she opens her mouth to try to take it back, but Rey is already talking in an unstoppable urgent hiss.

 

“ _Kylo Ren_ would think he was _God’s gift to women_ , not even for anything he _did_ , just for, I don’t know, _being;_ like he’d touch you, and it would be exciting, because you’d think, _oh, he wants_ _to touch me, he has things he thinks of doing with his_ _big enormous_ _hands_ , and he’d kiss you really hard and you’d get your hopes all up, but then he’d probably not even think to do anything else, just jump straight to fucking, right away, and he’d try to prompt you to tell him how _big_ he was, and if you didn’t come, which you probably wouldn’t, he’d either pretend you had or take it as a _mortal insult_ and _sulk!”_

 

Rey bangs her right hand against the catwalk again, hard, and then shoves it between her knees, glaring. Rose stares. She can’t help it. “You, uh… you sound like you… uh, might… know?”

 

Rey sighs, still looking at her hand. “I don’t know.”

 

“But… you’ve thought about it?” Rose looks at her face again. “You’ve thought about it.”

 

Another sigh, and Rey nods, morose. “Too much. I’m just… I was just lonely.” She looks miserably at Rose, who aches to see her unhappy and knows a thing or two about loneliness herself. She knows it shows on her face, the ache and the knowledge, and she sees that it calls more words out of Rey. “I’ve been so alone, and I was so curious, about everything, if my parents aren’t – then I have to be an adult, don’t I, and there’s so much to that, and I mean I’ve never even _had_ sex, not really, but it all seemed to go together, sex and the Force and leaving Jakku and being an adult and he was there in the middle of it.” She sniffs. “And he _does_ have nice hands. I suppose.”

 

Rose doesn’t think Kylo Ren’s hands are the point of interest here. “You’ve never had sex? But you were – we were – “

 

A furious blush spreads over Rey’s face. “You have to _talk_ like you have. Or else no one will tell you anything about it, or treat you like an adult at all. If you say you’ve never had it, they tell you to find an edu-vid or something. I’ve _seen_ all the edu-vids. But if you act like you already _know,_ people will tell you things. And I mean, I understand the _principles._ I know how to do for _myself._ Figured that out quick.”

 

“It took me ages,” confesses Rose. “I really thought I wasn’t supposed to touch myself there at all. But – you could have just said. To me. I wouldn’t – I mean, I’d tell you anything.”

 

“But you… you’ll think of me like a child,” Rey says softly, dragging her thumb back and forth over her knee. Rose thinks of how she’d licked her fingers before, and swallows.

 

“I promise. I wouldn’t. I don’t. I,” and Rose swallows again, swallows what she almost says. She reaches into the box between them. There’s only one pastry left, and she holds it up delicately. “Split it?”

 

Rey frowns. “That can’t be fair… oh, I ate some of yours! I’m so sorry.”

 

“You were hungry,” says Rose, forgivingly, still holding out the pastry.

 

Rey shakes her head. “No. I was greedy.”

 

Rose thinks that, if she can kiss a Stormtrooper who may not know what sex is, maybe she this is just something she’s good at, like engines, putting the moves on virgins. “All right,” she says, making sure to catch and hold Rey’s eyes, “I’ll eat it. I’ll eat it all. And you can lick my fingers when I’m done.” Rey’s mouth opens, and Rose does not break eye contact as she brings the last sweet morsel to her lips. She keeps her eyes steady and her hand at her mouth, in Rey’s line of sight, and she sees Rey’s eyes flick down to it, and back to her eyes, and down to her hand again. Rose suddenly remembers that it didn’t exactly _work,_ the last time she hit on a virginal rebel, and panic starts to trickle through her veins, even as the syrup of the last sweet fills her mouth, but then Rey’s hand closes around her wrist and Rey’s eyes are suddenly burning.

 

“Aren’t you so glad?” she says softly, as she pulls Rose’s hand toward her mouth, “Aren’t _I_ so glad that I made you clean your fingers?” And she runs her tongue firmly and slowly between Rose’s index and middle fingers.

 

Rose shivers. “I would _never_ treat you like a child.” She looks out across the heads of the ground crew; Poe is long gone and no one is looking at them but the catwalk is still an exposed place to be doing this. “There’s an escape pod held for maintenance just down there.”

 

Rey doesn’t let go of her hand as they get up and Rose lets her fingers curl up to stroke the inside of Rey’s wrist. The back of Rey’s neck turns scarlet and she runs the last few steps to the door of the pod, jumping in and yanking Rose, who stumbles a little, and finds herself on her knees, one sticky hand held by a Jedi girl whose breath is coming very fast, and who reaches out a hand to close the door without touching it. Rose wraps her oily left hand around Rey’s bare ankle and tugs, pulling her to a seat on the padded bench, with Rose there between her knees and Rose’s hand still in her hand. Rey brings her mouth back to lick and lick and lick at her fingers, so eagerly and with such a flustered blush on her face that Rose can only smile, and slowly rub a languid circle of black oil into Rey’s calf with her dirty thumb. It feels good, not just Rey’s tongue and Rey’s leg but to be the _knowing_ one. She’d thought Rey was brazen and tough and worldly, and maybe in some things she is, but here, Rose is ahead.

 

 

Rose licks her lips and tastes the syrup still, as Rey must taste it on her fingers, and she twists her hand in Rey’s grip to hold her chin and draw her down for a kiss, firm and warm. Rey breathes like a swimmer, gasping, as shocked at Rose’s hot mouth as at a cold wave, and Rose lets her go, lets her breathe.

 

She turns her fingers again, against Rey’s throat, stroking. She feels tender, and powerful. Rey’s clothes aren’t as dirty as her coveralls, but they’re not clean, either; there are already oil smudges, so she doesn’t feel bad that she leaves more when she goes to unfasten Rey’s belt. The belt is double-wrapped, and then her tunic wraps around her, and her gauntlets around her wrists, her sleeves around her arms, her linen band around her breasts. Rey is enwrapped, in so many ways, that undressing her will be like unspooling wire. Rey’s eyes are wide as Rose unwraps pieces of her; she spins gently, freeing herself, but she always turns back to staring, staring at Rose.

 

“You don’t have to take everything off,” Rose says gently, her fingers slipping over the edges of Rey’s arm-bindings, across her breast-band. “If something makes you feel comfortable. If something makes you feel strong.” Rey’s hands go to her wrapped sleeves, drifting.

 

“Do – do you feel stronger – dressed?” asks Rey, looking at Rose as she kneels there in her dirty suit and scuffed boots, and Rose pauses.

 

“Yes,” she says slowly. Her fingers unlace her boots, push them off. “You don’t always need to feel strong, though. Or I don’t.” She unzips her coveralls, peeling out as easy as a candy from a wrapper. Underneath her white shirt is soaked in sweat, especially under her suspenders, and her black pants cling to her thighs. Her pendant sticks to the skin between her breasts. Her shirt is meant to have built-in support, but it’s thin and she knows she’s clearly outlined under the sweaty fabric. “I like to choose,” she concludes, “how much I want to wear, how strong I want to feel.”

 

“I want to feel strong,” Rey says, looking down at the parts of her that are still wrapped up tightly: her arms, her breasts, her hips in her short pants. “I always want to feel strong.” She looks at Rose, then, her eyes flickering over Rose’s lips and down to the high, soft hills of her breasts, and her voice trembles a little. “But I want to feel good. Too. And I want to... to...” She reaches for Rose’s clean hand again, bringing it to her lips, sliding her mouth down over her fingers so that Rose trembles and sighs at the wet heat. She sees Rey looking at her, looking so _pleased_ with herself, and she laughs. She takes her fingers back, out of Rey’s mouth with a little _pop_ and strips off her shirt. She rises higher on her knees, bringing her bare breasts closer to Rey’s fascinated gaze, and feels warm power move through her again.

 

“I feel strong,” she whispers. “I feel strong because I _know_ you want to touch me. Go ahead, Rey. Touch.”

 

Rey slides her whole hands, fingers spread and palms flat, down Rose’s chest, hungrily taking hold of her breasts and Rose smiles slyly as Rey gasps, fluttering her fingers gently against the softness of her. “Can I – can I touch you... harder?” she asks, her voice soft and thin. Rose nods and Rey’s eyes close as she clutches Rose’s yielding breasts. Rose inhales.

 

“I like that,” she says, her voice low. Rey licks her lips and doesn’t open her eyes. “I like it when you touch me hard. Make me feel how bad you want me.” Her hands close over Rey’s, guiding them a little, so that her hardened nipples press into Rey’s palms. “You can feel how much I like it.” Rey nods slowly, eyes still closed in bliss, mouth opening at the testimony of Rose’s pleasure.

 

Rose puts her finger on the taut edge of Rey’s breast-bindings, and plucks the fabric like a taut wire. Rey presses herself forward, into her hands, and Rose cups her small breasts gently, teasing at the undersides with her thumbs. Rey squirms. “Take it off,” she whispers, not wanting to let go of Rose, “and touch me like this – like I’m touching you.”

 

Rose unwinds Rey’s breasts, and does what she asks for a moment. Rey’s breasts are small but so are Rose’s hands, and she can palm them from below and wrap her fingers around them with gentle kneading motions. But she can’t quite resist; those little breasts are right exactly in front of her face and she barely has to move to take a crinkling brown nipple in her mouth and strike her tongue across it.

 

Rey throws herself backward with a yelp of delight, and Rose glances up at her with a small smile, trying not to look too smug. She leans forward and does it again, with a gentler motion of her tongue. Rey writhes underneath her, kicking out with her still-booted feet on either side of Rose’s hips. Rose reaches down and traps Rey’s legs under her arms, holding them against her as she moves her mouth to the other breast. The escape pod is warming around them, filling with the scent of sweat, arousal, and machine oil. Rose slips a hand – the right one, the clean one – inside Rey’s thigh, just above the knee, and runs her fingers over the inseam of Rey’s pants. Rey squirms harder now, but Rose keeps her legs held. Rey could throw her across the room if she wanted to. Rose knows she could. But Rose has a game and Rey wants to play.

 

She keeps her fingers moving and shifts her mouth down a little, licking the underside of Rey’s breasts with a firm tongue, tracing the seam of her flesh. Rey throws her head back and her back arches. Her legs shake. Rose doesn’t stop moving her hand against Rey’s thigh, but she takes her mouth away. “Anything else you want? While I’m here?”

 

Rey drops her head to look at her, eyes incredulous and stunned. She’s panting. She’s taller than Rose, stronger than Rose, but she is entirely overcome. Overwhelmed. Rose smiles. “Just checking,” she says serenely, and drops her head again, to lick and kiss Rey’s stomach now. Her hand slides up a little along the seam of the pants, and Rey squeezes her tight between her knees. Rose nuzzles against Rey’s waist, and slips her tongue under the drawstring of Rey’s pants.

 

She feels Rey’s fingers in her hair, then, determined, pushing her back, and she goes back obediently, sitting on her heels. Rey is gasping for air but she pitches forward to grab Rose’s mouth with hers. Her kisses are aggressive, exploratory, but in each she can feel the sharp upward curve of Rey’s lips, her bright smile. She also feels Rey’s legs on either side of her, twisting as she wrestles her low boots off.

 

“You seem like you know what you want,” say Rose. “That’s always good.” She takes hold of the cord of Rey’s pants and, teasingly, undoes the bow as slowly as she can. “Though… really… you should be clear.” Now Rey’s pants are undone and her eyes are huge. “What _exactly_ do you want, Rey?”

 

Rose enjoys the squeak this gets out of her, the way it makes her stammer, but nothing is as sweet to her ears as Rey’s urgent whisper, as if they were in a secret plot together. “What… what you were doing. With your… your tongue. I want you to do it. Between my legs.” Rose runs her clean fingers gently over the crotch of Rey’s pants with a wicked smile, and Rey writhes. “Oh, oh, _please_ , Rose!” She lifts her hips, pushing her pants down until Rose has to help her take them off or else be tangled in them. “Please, _please.”_

 

“Was this in the edu-vids you saw?” asks Rose, pretending to wonder, as she begins to nuzzle the inside of Rey’s legs. Oh, she can smell her. Not botanical like the pastry syrup and not simple like engine grease, but rich and animal and smeared on her thighs, glistening in the hair between her legs.

 

Rey is gasping, trying to talk, maundering. “I mean, yes, they said, but they didn’t, it was just, they’d have a section on foreplay, but, I, oh, is this _foreplay?”_

 

Rose chuckles. “No,” she says, and licks the salty slickness on the seam of Rey’s thigh. “This is sex.” She clamps her hands down on Rey’s hips, gently but firmly, and nestles her face into Rey’s bush of brown hair. “This is sex, and you are going to taste amazing.”

 

Rey can’t even manage words, just a frantic whimper, and Rose digs in deeper, finding the divide in Rey’s vulva with her nose and nestling in. She rubs her nose gently against Rey’s clit and reaches up with her tongue to lick her wetness from the source. Rey gasps and writhes, but Rose holds her steady. She closes her eyes, enjoying the smell and the taste and the desperate sounds, and begins to try things out – a flickering in-and-out of her tongue makes Rey gasp, but after a moment she thinks it might be more surprise than pleasure. She tries a strong, steady, flat-tongued lick from hole to hood, and Rey’s legs clamp down against her ears, so she keeps that up, and Rey whines and grinds her hips against her mouth. Rose hums, gently, and Rey’s whimpers go to a higher pitch.

 

Rose wraps her left arm around Rey’s thigh, and admires the patterns her filthy fingers make on Rey’s clean skin. Rey’s high-pitched whine is beginning to drop a little, and Rose moves her mouth up. She seals her lips tightly around Rey’s clit and begins to strum it steadily with her tongue, and at the same time, she slips two fingers of her clean right hand inside Rey.

 

It’s hard for her not to think of Rey stressing the size of Kylo Ren’s hands. But Rose is a practical woman, and she knows that size in this matter is like racing stripes on a fighter – a matter of taste, not effectiveness. Her careful little fingers find the spot quite efficiently and Rey convulses and moans. The circles of her hips get jerkier, her legs cross and clench behind Rose’s shoulders, and every muscle in her body seems taut with anticipation. Rose keeps it up, losing herself in the hypnotic pull of her action and the pleasure of being so tightly held in a soft, warm place, until Rey half-shrieks, half-gasps, and seizes up, thrashing so wildly that Rose is briefly worried. What happens when you make a Jedi come? She’s never even heard an urban legend.

 

But all that happens is that the Jedi tumbles off the seat, gasping for air, and sits up on her elbows to stare at Rose as though Rose has won a battle single-handed.

 

Which Rose very arguably has.

 

She tries not to look too proud of herself when she smiles, and probably fails, but Rey doesn’t seem to notice. She’s still breathing hard, but she sits up and kisses Rose with remarkable thoroughness. She presses her nose into the rumpled, turned-up hair beside Rose’s ear and murmurs, “Can I lick your fingers?”

 

What’s Rose going to do, say no? She holds up her slick fingers for Rey to suck into her mouth. She can feel Rey’s teeth a little, but she doesn’t mind. She looks at Rey’s naked breasts rising and falling, and sees her black fingerprints on the softest and most private part of Rey’s thigh. She aches, herself, and if Rey is going to fall asleep she’ll just touch herself, but Rey doesn’t look tired, and may in fact be sneakily reading Rose’s mind, because she lets her fingers slip out of her mouth just exactly then and says, “My turn. Now it’s my turn, right? If you want it to be?” Rose just nods and Rey is unzipping her pants.

 

Rey crouches down on her elbows and knees, licking her lips. She looks up at Rose. “What you did – is that what you like, too?”

 

“I wouldn’t _mind,”_ Rose says, “but I can tell you what I like best, if you want?”

 

“ _Please,”_ says Rey.

 

“Start with just one finger,” Rose begins, and Rey throws herself flat on her front between her legs, hands ready and eyes intent. “Palm up. Slip it in to me, and ah – you can feel that place? Yes, there, ah ah ah, yes.” Rey’s finger moves gently and quickly, a steady vibration like a smooth engine. Rose begins to feel that sweet electrified feeling inside her; her head tips back and words and sighs spill out of her. “Like that oh yes ah fuck God good yeah ah… ah… lick me, yeah, please, yeah, just soft, put your chin in your palm and lick me.” Rey’s tongue sets gently to work and her fine flyaway hairs tickle Rose’s thighs. The voltage inside her amps up and her hips buck but Rey stays with her as if she were magnetized, doesn’t falter, only increases the pressure just perceptibly and it feels so good, so good, so good; Rose closes her eyes and there is nothing in the galaxy but this pleasure that electrifies her. And Rey keeps her there, in the current of it, until her gasps wear down in her throat, knowing to bring her back gently, easing her out of it.

 

When she finally lets her go entirely, she sits back between Rose’s knees and stares in astonishment at her own fingers, and then at Rose, and then at her fingers again, a smile dawning unstoppably on her face. Rose is so blissed out she wonders if even her hair has relaxed, but she can’t help being amused by how obviously _proud_ of herself Rey is. And in fact the first words she squeaks out after Rose makes eye contact are, “I did it!” As if she were a child who’d made their first ride on a scooter.

 

“You definitely did it,” Rose agrees. “Good job!” Rey is so pleased, and so transparently hungry for her approval that she can’t help but smile. She promised Rey she wouldn’t treat her like a child, but there is something distinctly child-like about the Jedi, even as she goes about the undeniably adult business of licking Rose’s taste from her own fingers.

 

Rey leans her head against Rose’s thigh then, closing her eyes. Her smile fades into something more plaintive. “I don’t want to go back outside,” she murmurs.

 

Neither does Rose, really. It’s soporifically warm in here, and no one is the boss of them. She wants to stay; she wants to doze; she wants to be apart from everything bad and unpleasant. But cold bands of responsibility are beginning to tighten around her heart. This has been an extremely long break she’s taken from work. Someone may be looking for her, or for Rey. Even if they’re not needed right this second, they’ll be needed soon, in their own ways – Rey, the Jedi, the star warrior; Rose, the necessary part of the silent machine of rebellion.

 

And there are other things to think of, too. She imagines Finn, someday not too far away, where Rey is now, looking at her not with Rey’s glow of conspiracy but with his steady gaze. She thinks of his vulnerability, his loyalty. Is Rey thinking of someone? If she is, it’s not immediately obvious – she seems to have eyes only for Rose. But Rose can’t help but wonder if there isn’t some vision playing in her mind, of a different dark head where Rose’s has been. “Well,” she says, “now you don’t have to just pretend you know about sex. Now you really do know.”

 

“You are _much_ better than a holo-vid,” Rey groans, as Rose slips away from her gently and begins to put her clothes back on.

 

“Hey,” says Rose with her slyest smile, “I’m the best you ever had, right?” Rey laughs. She’s still naked, and Rose puts her breast band into her hands, a gentle prompt. Time to go back. Duty calls. “And if you ever hear anybody speculating about how I might be in bed… you can tell them.”

 

“I’ll sing your praises,” Rey promises, and begins to re-enfold herself in her clothes.

 

When they’re both dressed again and have their hair settled, Rose takes a moment to do a quick sanitary maneuver on the place. “Don’t want to leave a mess for another mechanic,” she explains to Rey, who nods, and helps her. The assistance frees up a corner of Rose’s mind to wander, and it wanders to some strange places. As they finally climb out of the pod and shut the door behind them, she looks up at Rey with a quirk of a smile. “I think you’re wrong, actually. About Kylo Ren.”

 

A startled look crosses Rey’s face, mixed with something else. Amusement? Offense? Hope? “I am?”

 

“Yeah,” says Rose, with a determined nod. “I bet, really, what he wants is for you to hit him. He wants you to push him down and rough him up and _make_ him be good.”

 

“You think so?” Rey is definitely amused now, but she’s also curious. Rose nods vigorously.

 

“The worse they want to rule the universe, the worse they want to be slapped around. Plus, he’d probably be terrified of not performing adequately; it’d really take a burden off him if you ordered him around.” She imagines Rey with her knees planted on the Supreme Leader’s shoulders, and smiles to herself. “Anyway. I have four more exterior doors on my list before I can knock off for the day.”

 

Rey nods and starts to let Rose turn away, but then her hand shoots out and catches Rose by her right elbow. Her touch is tentative, and her eyes are on the ground. “Thank you,” she says, softly. “Rose… I… thank you.”

 

Rose wraps her fingers around Rey’s. She’s left so much oil on Rey’s skin that the left hand is almost as clean as the right, and the thought fills her with pride and heat, the kind of heat she can turn to in cold moments. “My pleasure,” she says. “And thank you too. For the sweets. And the company. And for everything.”


End file.
